The Unburied Treasures of Angkor, Cambodia
Dr. Alison Carter
Travel to the Frontiers of Science and discover The Unburied Treasures of Angkor, Cambodia at The Belfry on Tuesday, March 24 with guest speaker Dr. Alison Carter of the University of Oregon.
Dr. Carter has worked in Angkor since 2011 as a member of the Greater Angkor Project and currently co-directs a project exploring Angkorian household archaeology.
Angkor, centered in the modern nation of Cambodia, has been the focus of more than a century of epigraphic, art historical, and architectural research. From the 9th to the 15th centuries, the Angkorian state was Southeast Asia’s greatest pre-modern empire, and Angkor Wat, a Hindu-Buddhist temple complex in the World Heritage site of Angkor, is one of its largest religious monuments.
Dr. Carter, however, has a different focus. She's interested in the lives of the people who built the temples, kept the shrines running, produced the food, and managed the water, that is, the people whose legacy of survival might be described as the greatest treasure of all.
Dr. Carter is co-director of an Earthwatch Project, "Unearthing the Ancient Secrets of Angkor in Cambodia," that is designed to study how these communities survived political conflicts from rival kingdoms and multiple periods of drought and flooding.
Most recently, her study area has expanded to include excavation of occupation mounds near the small provincial temple of Prasat Basaet, across the Tonle Sap Lake from the Angkorian capital in the province of Battambang.
Cambodia sits in the Mekong Basin, an area that is already experiencing profound impacts from climate change such as drought, deforestation, and landscape disruption.
"Such environmentally unstable conditions were all too familiar to the people of Angkor, who found strategies to adjust and accommodate to environmental unpredictability for centuries," explains Earthwatch on the project's website.
Dr. Carter's research is ground-breaking, both literally and figuratively, and described by Earthwatch as "the first study of its kind to examine daily life of the non-elite people who existed during the Angkorian and post-Angkorian periods."
